George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (55 page)

“Ouch.” Michael spread his lower hands. The lines of his tattoos crawled over his abdomen and biceps with the movement. “Hey, I was just pissed off when I said that, Ana. I really didn’t mean it to stick.”

“It did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. I’ll bet you are.” Ana took a breath, looking away from him to the nearest tent and back. “Kate doesn’t need you here. Your being around is only going to stir things up again, and that’s dangerous for Kate. You’ve hurt her badly enough. Distract her here and you could kill her.”

“C’mon, Ana, lighten up.”

Her dark eyes glittered under the hat. She glanced again at the tent. “I’m not joking.” Michael could see a deep sadness in her eyes, a grief that had never been there before. “You care about Kate? Then stay away from her. She won’t say that to you because she’s too polite for her own good, but I will.”

“She’s in there, isn’t she? Why don’t I just ask her what she thinks?”

“I can’t stop you. You always get what you want, don’t you?”

“Not always,” Michael told her. “Not with—” He stopped.

The tent flap flipped open and Kate stepped out. She looked tired and worried, the skin pouched and brown under her eyes. If she was startled to see him, she didn’t show it. He wondered if she’d been listening and for how long. “Michael,” she said, and a faint smile brushed her lips. She tossed a marble up and down in her right hand. Ana sniffed loudly and Kate glanced at her. “Take a walk with me, Michael?”

“Sure.” He extended his middle left hand to Kate. Her head moved from side to side faintly and he let the hand drop back down.

“We need to get you a hat,” she said. “And something over your torso and arms. You’re going to burn up here.”

She said little else, and Michael was content to walk alongside her. She led him across the road to an observation tower on the northern face of the dam. The guard there, a joker whose face was silver and reflective, nodded to Kate and opened the door. Beyond was a set of metal stairs. When they reached the first platform, she stopped and pointed north—downstream. The water on that side lay a few hundred feet below them, a winding lake held back by another dam several miles north. “That’s the Low Dam, Aswan Dam, built by the British,” Kate said, seeing where he was looking. “Four miles away, maybe a little more. The island just this side of it, the smaller one over to the right, is Philae; some of the Living Gods are there right now, but mostly they’re on Sehel Island, just on the other side of the dam. The Gods and their followers restored the ruins of the temples and rebuilt the town over the last several years. Philae’s really gorgeous, truly breathtaking. You should go see it if you get the chance, before …” She didn’t finish the phrase. Her voice was strained, dispassionate, and too quick. Michael thought she was talking mostly so he couldn’t.

“The main city of Aswan’s maybe another four or five miles past the Low Dam on the east bank,” she continued. “Syrene’s on the western bank, directly across from Sehel—again, just a bit north of the dam. Right now there’s a quarter million or so of the followers of the Living Gods living there, most of them refugees from downriver—from Alexandria, Cairo, Karnak, and Luxor. They can’t go any farther. There’s nowhere else in Egypt where they could survive except along the Nile. So they’ll stand here, with their Living Gods.”

Kate touched his arm, pointing behind them. Michael turned, feeling the lingering touch of her fingers on his skin. South of the dam, a gigantic lake pooled behind the curved ramparts of the dam out to the horizon, its water crowding the top of the structure. “Yeah, Lake Nasser,” he said. “I know. I looked at the maps.”

Kate smiled. “You knew all this?”

“Pretty much. Figured it might be useful.”

A nod. “If it weren’t for Ana, we would have already lost Syrene and Sehel Island, and I don’t know how many people. We won the battle but almost lost Aswan Dam in the process. That wouldn’t be as catastrophic as if
this
dam were to rupture—that would send a wall of water rushing all the way down to the Mediterranean—but it would have been bad enough. Controlling the dams is the key to controlling Egypt.” She took a breath. “Some of the Living Gods are afraid that Abdul-Alim might just try and take out the High Dam if things get desperate. He’s a fanatic, Michael. He means to destroy the Living Gods and all their followers.”

Michael stared downriver. On Philae, the sun glinted on gilded columns. Feluccas dotted the waters of the Nile, moving from island to island, shore to shore. He tried to imagine it all gone in a roaring fury of white water.

“Why’d you come, Michael?”

He knew she’d ask. He’d formulated a hundred replies to the question on the way, but they’d all evaporated in the heat and sunlight and her presence. He licked dry lips. “I wanted … the way things happened back on
American Hero
… I don’t know, Kate. I really don’t. It’s all fucking mixed up in my head. I wasn’t happy where I was. Even playing with the band wasn’t helping. I felt like if I came here—if I showed up …” He tapped at his chest; a mournful, low
dhoom
answered. “Y’know, back in L.A., we talked about doing something genuine, something that wasn’t faked and artificial. I’ve been on stage most of my life; I worked my ass off to get where I am. But I know I could do more. The fame, the money—I have all of that I need. I can either play with it all, or I can
use
it. The visibility, the publicity, the money—they can be tools, just like what the wild card gave me. Sometimes they’re better.” He flicked his fingers over his chest; a rapid drumbeat answered as the throats along his neck pulsed—a quartet of paradiddles, followed by the splash of a cymbal. “I’ve always been able to get what I want if I work at it hard enough.” He found her gaze, held it. “Every time but once. I really hate fucking up. With you, I fucked up worse than I ever have, and I’m not even sure why. I know I’ve regretted it every day since.”

“Sometimes you can’t have what you want just ’cause you want it.” She hefted the marble; her arm arced back and forward almost too fast to see. He heard the hiss of the glass ball through the air. A moment later, far out in Lake Nasser, a fountain of white water erupted. “I like you, Michael. I do. You can be charming and funny and empathetic, and when you drop the rock star act there’s actually a great person underneath.”

“But?”

“I can’t trust you. You’ve proven that.”

He spread all six hands wide. “How can I show you you’re wrong, Kate?”

“You can’t. And …” She stopped.

“And you’re with him. Fortune.”

One shoulder lifted. “I’m not here because of John. I’m here to stop the genocide. You should understand the difference.”

“You can trust
him
, with that thing in his brain? That’s not even Fortune talking half the time. What if he’s just a marionette dancing on Sekhmet’s strings? Remember how he was when we first met him? Just Berman’s toady, Momma Peregrine’s little fetch-it boy. We all thought that he was a joke. Even you, I bet.”

“Shut up, Michael.” Her cheeks flushed. “Look, I’m—I’m glad you’re here. I’m sure we can use your strength.”

He flexed his arms reflexively. “My strength. But that’s all.”

She caught her lower lip in her teeth, as if trying to stop herself from saying more. “We should get back,” she said finally. “We’ll need to find you a place to sleep. Maybe you could share a tent with Rusty.”

“Toolbelt? The iron bigot? No fucking way.”

“He’s not that. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.”

“If you say so.”

“No. Here. Hold it like this.” Michael demonstrated the proper way to hold a drumstick to the child, a dark-skinned,
dog-headed boy. He was thinking that Ahmed the cabdriver had been right: animal-headed jokers were common as sand among the followers of the Living Gods. He gave the drumstick back to the kid and a loud percussive
crack
followed as the boy slammed the stick onto Michael’s chest.

Michael lay on the ground outside his tent, his top arms under his head, the others set close to his body as a crowd of joker children gathered around him, laughing and jabbering excitedly as they played him as if he were a drum set. Parents and other adults watched, smiling from the periphery. Masud, his soldier fan, stood nearby, clapping and smiling. A joker with eyes set on long stalks and press credentials draped around his neck pulled a heavy, professional video camera to his shoulder and put his eyestalk to the viewfinder. A red light pulsed next to the lens.

The racket was incredible, and Michael’s neck throats yawned open as he let the sound boom out. There was a definite beat—the two kids kneeling by the lowest of the tympanic rings on his abdomen poured forth a subsonic
phoom
that was more felt than heard, a steady rhythm that struck the onlookers like invisible, soft fists. The children playing the higher-pitched, smaller rings above unleashed a cascade of varied tones as Michael shaped the noise with the matrix of vocal cords layered in his thick neck.

The noise radiated out, forte.

Rustbelt came out from the tent, yawning with a groan like ancient hinges. One of the kids rushed to him and began tapping at his leg with a drumstick. “Hey, you’re not a half-bad cowbell,” Michael said to him, half-shouting.

Rustbelt glanced at the knot of kids flailing at Michael’s body. “Cripes,” he said. “What are you doing, fella?”

“Getting to know the locals. Kids are kids, no matter where you are.”

Rustbelt glanced at the joker with the videocam. “Yeah.”

Some of the aces and the Living Gods had come to investigate the racket as well. Through the crowd, Michael could see Lohengrin and Fortune standing several yards away, looking at the scene as Fortune shook his head and whispered something to Lohengrin. Slightly behind them, he glimpsed Kate
and Ana. He lifted a middle hand to wave to Kate. She nodded. Michael glanced over at Rustbelt, who was also looking in Kate’s direction. “‘I like kids’ can’t be a bad message.”

Rustbelt grunted. It sounded like a dump truck farting. “Not so long as it’s true.” Eyebrows lifted above the rust spots on his face. He stepped away carefully from the child banging on his leg and walked toward the other aces. Kate glanced back once, but through the arms and the blur of drumsticks, Michael couldn’t see if she was smiling or not.

He awoke to predawn explosions—a stutter of blasts muffled by distance and reverberations, sounding almost like a distant thunderstorm. He blinked, wondering if he’d dreamt the sound, but as he dressed quickly and splashed water over his face, Rustbelt came clanking into their tent, his massive steam shovel jaw half-open. “What the fuck’s the racket?” Michael asked him.

“The Living God fellas are blowing up the airport so the Caliph can’t land his soldiers in airplanes,” Rustbelt replied.

Michael blinked, rubbing at sleep-rimed eyes with his top hands. “They could have waited until daylight.”

“They could have.” Michael wasn’t sure what that meant. Rustbelt hooked a thumb toward the entrance of the tent. “Come on. Lohengrin said to get everybody up.”

Fifteen minutes later, most of the aces were gathered in the command tent, Michael wearing a long, loose white shirt with holes torn in it for his multiple arms and a blue scarf turbaned around his shaved head. The scene reminded Michael of the tryout sessions for
American Hero
, with so many of the former contestants standing there: Curveball, Earth Witch, Rustbelt, Bugsy, Holy Roller, Fat Chick, Simoon, Hardhat…

Most of them ignored him after a glance his way.

Fortune looked worried, but he looked up when Kate entered, nodding to her. Michael saw her give him a tightlipped smile in return—so it was Fortune and not Sekhmet running the body at the moment. “Here’s what we know,” he said. “The army of the caliphate is still advancing along the
Nile. Right now they’re within thirty miles of Aswan, just leaving Kôm Ombo. They have Chinese WZ-10 attack helicopters providing cover and ground troops in APCs in the vanguard. The Djinn is back with Abdul, but we can’t assume he’ll stay there.”

“What about the fucking Egyptians?” Hardhat asked. “Is one ass-kicking enough for them, or do they want a fucking encore?”